What was your first set?

[jchcollins]

Though I didn’t technically complete it until at least 15 years later, the 1986 Topps set was the one that introduced me to baseball cards, and buying packs at the local grocery store (Cashion’s, Cornelius NC) - and later the 7-11 in the neighboring town. I was 9 years old.

As mentioned elsewhere earlier in the thread, the Topps “Garbage Pail Kids” had been my introduction to trading cards of any sort the year before. GPK were great, (even though parents and teachers hated them…) but later a trading buddy boasted to me that he had the entire 792 card set of 1985 Topps baseball cards. I scoffed at this at the time, believing that it was impossible for anyone to have that many cards. I’m not sure when I got the notion to buy a pack of my own of something other than GPK, but I know it was one day with my mom at the grocery store. The blue packs I believe were 35 cents. Not sure what all I got in that first pack, but I know one of the cards was the Dwight Gooden RB card, because he was the only player in the pack I had actually heard of at the time. Later, (after discovering my cousin and his father, my uncle - were big into cards themselves…) I learned a bit more about the game and came to understand that the cards you wanted most from the packs we were buying were Don Mattingly, and Pete Rose. I pulled a Mattingly at some point, but never that year was I able to land the Rose player card. Even though my cousin had like 3 dupes, he refused to trade me one. I had to settle for the Rose manager card. It was at least another 10 years before I finally obtained an ‘86 Topps Rose base card, I think at a show. Though I understood the concept of “sets”, my ‘86 cards on the whole were probably less than a quarter of the complete set coming out of packs I had bought. It wasn’t until I was a young adult, probably in 2001 that I finally sat down one day on the floor of my trendy 1-bedroom singles apartment with two unopened wax boxes of ‘86 Topps that I had scored I think for $11 total at a nearby LCS. Momentarily 9 again, I shredded the wax with joy for about an hour, and then began the arduous task of sorting by number. Eventually the finally complete set went into a binder - yes, with Pete Rose included. My original ‘86 Topps cards remained at my parents house in a shoebox, ever distinct from their later year set replacements by the worn corners, and thumbtack holes from being affixed to the bulletin boards in my childhood room. I later found a boxed traded set, and added an additional 132 cards to the binder.

While the ‘86 Topps design isn’t exactly inspirational - in the hierarchy of Topps’ body of work, they won’t even likely merit a footnote - those cards will always be nostalgic to me, and valuable in a personal way that will never be reflected in price tags outside of PSA 10 HOF’ers. The card hobby was still gearing up to it’s zenith in 1986, and soon after that first pack I was interested in cards, only cards - not even girls yet - for at least a few more years to come. Life was fantastic. I was surrounded by family and friends that loved me, and baseball cards were everywhere. Though even then as a kid I had already began to romanticize about what I perceived as simpler times - (the 1950’s!) - I guess I was blind to the fact while it was happening that much of that same simplicity and joy was surrounding me in the same way in the late 1980’s.

As I got into my teens and then as an adult collector, my path never really turned into seeing sets as the main way of organization for what I wanted to do with the hobby. I turned out (as the 80’s turned into the 90’s…) to be way more interested in postwar vintage singles than current sets, even from my own time also actively collecting “new stuff” in the hobby, which ran from ‘86 to roughly 1994, when cars and friends, first jobs and all those hugely important teenage responsibilities finally claimed my brain full time. However, just in the past few years - I’ve decided that it would be a shame if I never did any set work again - so I’ve taken on 1967 and ‘72 Topps - two of my vintage favorites. I’m still in the early stages, but thankfully already have a lot of stars from both to keep them anchored for some time to come. Honestly, given the nausea that the money aspect of the hobby lately has increasingly provided me with - even just collecting the commons from those sets would probably keep me plenty busy for at least another decade to come.


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